He was a Swiss social critic who, in the prime of life, broke free from the Establishment and started a new life explaining and criticizing late 20th century capitalism, which eventually led to his becoming a bestselling author (Nach uns die Zukunft, Auf die Bäume ihr Affen). Pestalozzi was born in Zürich. After his university education, which he received in St. Gallen, he started working for Migros and soon began to climb the career ladder. In the 1960s he also built up the Gottlieb Duttweiler Institute, a think tank named after the Migros founder (who had died in 1962).

The institute was being established to investigate the range of possible shortcomings and negative effects of capitalism, in particular within Western consumer society, so that they could be combated more effectively.

Pestalozzi fulfilled that task very thoroughly, especially in his lectures, so much so that in 1977 he was fired by Migros. Rather than looking for a new job, he became a freelance writer and self-proclaimed “autonomous agitator” who sided with the fledgling European youth, peace and ecological movements. He preached “positive subversion” and, in a Kantian manner, tried to convince people that using their own intelligence was the right thing to do. Moreover, he demanded a guaranteed minimum income for everybody. Hans A. Pestalozzi died a recluse in his home Heimetli near Wattwil, Canton of St. Gallen. (wikipedia).

… At this point I would like to relate a story which is familiar to many Swiss: that of Hans A. Pestalozzi. He had a typical successful career in Swiss terms – university study with a doctorate in business management, the rank of major in the Swiss militia army, screened for left-wing ideology on special courses such as SKU, at 45 directing the renowned Centre for Management and New Concepts run by Migros, the largest Swiss food distributor, in Rüschlikon on Lake Zürich.

In a talk given at a provincial middle school Hans A. Pestalozzi calculated the energy contained in a pot of yogurt bought in the supermarket and compared it with the energy consumed if the housewife buys the milk from the farmer or the milkman and cultivates the yogurt herself in a pot. It goes without saying that MIGROS did not want alternative ideas to be developed in this direction and reminded Pestalozzi which side his bread was buttered on. Pestalozzi did not prove responsive to this but went for head-on confrontation and was fired within 6 months. His institute had been transformed in this period from an impeccably organized one to a centre of “chaos” and Pestalozzi himself became the No. 1 left-wing enemy of the system, who presented theses, in books and television appearances, such as “All managers should be fired”, among others. When asked in interviews about his position in the army and other typical attributes of Swiss success stories, he dismissed it as the follies of youth. I personally invited Mr Pestalozzi to reflect on why such a highly intelligent man as he was able to go through life so blindly up to the mature age of 45 and was actually awakened only by the proverbial acorn accidentally found by the blind sow. That did not interest him. Confrontation with the system and the sense of injustice left room only for thoughts of revenge and not for any other calm thought.

The story encapsulates everything: how perfect our education system is and, when something breaks down, how easily the individual can be driven by the system into a state inviting ridicule – they need only be sufficiently goaded. What was positive about Pestalozzi was of course that he rebelled against the system, which, again, should not be over-valued: after all, he achieved a livelihood and fame with his books such as “Into the trees, you monkeys”. If he had not had this opportunity, he would have given up the ghost much earlier, like millions of other unknown soldiers in the graveyard of rankling injustice and free expression of opinion.

“Hans A. Pestalozzi, the story of a Swiss education” can perhaps only be understood from a Swiss perspective. Here we will try to analyse our education system and determine how the system manages to enable us to run around so blindly.

The intellectual élite of every higher cultural milieu obtains the basis of its education between the 13th and 20th year of age in middle school. This is the time when early man was initiated into the art of hunting; we spent this time swotting Latin and Greek, 12 hours a week, for years. What did we retain from it? Nothing, except that one can sometimes say, as of Franz Josef Strauss, when his coffin was led past the Greek statues in front of the Pinakothek, “To think that the deceased read all these writers in the original”.

The ancient languages with their sentence constructions were, almost like mathematics, a superb mental discipline, but it was from the study of German that we drew our understanding of culture. In order to discover the effect they had on our youth, one would have to read all the relevant works of Schiller, Lessing and Goethe again, 40 years later … (for full text of the whole long article, scroll down to ‘Thesis 3:’ of ‘Survival Marketing II‘ on the website KELLER.

My comment: His analyzes about our Elites are still valuable. Maybe the focus today has to be placed in higher realms inside this Elite levels than Hans A. Pestalozzi did, he remained with his critics on the manager level. Today we have to go to the level of the privat owners of the Federal Banks. But what he observed is still correct. Unfortunately very few of his conferences and texts has been translated in english. And unfortunatelly he crashed and finished his life by suizid.

Other Swiss than Hans A. Pestalozzi critizyse capitalisme, like Jean Ziegler, who is able to stand better the adversity inside the Swiss Elite which creates a compact wall of cynisme and hate agains any person giving a harsh critic of their cheerished banking and capitalistic system.